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The Cast at Camp Matrix Online
Kate Thompson writes "The Boston Phoenix followed up the news that Matrix Online would be hiring live performers to play characters from the movies (Morpheus, the Oracle). The article looks at what qualifications you need to be an events implementer (or "imp"), how they get their scripts, and how Lawrence Fishburne felt about watching an imp play his part. Warner Bros. apparently has big plans for this - they consider the Matrix Online to be the 'fourth Matrix movie,' and they want players to feel like they're actually shaping the Matrix story. It's not clear, though, how far they'll really take that."
From the article:
There's no industry standard job description for an "imp," and most of the 13 men and women on the team come from what Hewitt calls "unorthodox backgrounds." But he explains some of...
Wait, wait. Back the fuck up.
Thirteen? Thirteen people? That's it?
Considering any MMORPG is considered a huge flop unless they get at least 100,000 players, how much can 13 people possibly impact game play for the overwhelming majority of players?
13 People ammounts to a rounding error. There are zero live performers to interact with in this game. All hype, no story. Moving on.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I played my share of (and assisted other people playing) "dynamic quest" characters during a stint as a guide in EverQuest. The response from the players was formulaic: Big Continuity Character shows up in a zone, with rumblings and zone/server broadcasts to get the attention of the players. When the players do show up, the Big Continuity Character has some lines to deliver, but since typing is a lot slower than speaking - and is far slower than the ADHD most of the players evidently have - the game spam quickly overtakes the plot, making it impossible to get anything out of the game unless one is logging their chat to a file for later processing.
People start crowding around, severely increasing lag for everyone (including the quest actor, whose typing rate decreases sharply due to the video lag), and if the Big Continuity Character happens to be evil, two other factors increase lag even more: One, everybody thinks there's gonna be a fight, so they keep every buff in the spell book on themselves, meaning spellcasting spam is pretty much nonstop; and two, some people think that the only way to get lewts is to start the fight themselves, meaning that the quest actor can't get the lines out what with being attacked constantly.
There are all sorts of people that show up at these events - some are intent upon getting whatever lewts and rewards they can, some see the hundreds of people standing around as a good motivator for committing the MMOG equivalent of whipping it out in public (i.e., chat spam, frequently strewn with vulgarity), and some try to roleplay with the character regardless of the obviousness of some other plot unfolding which doesn't involve that particular player. Only a few are actually there to find out what's going on.
The result is that dynamic quests in a production environment are unfulfilling for all involved. Even when a guide or GM showed up in public and chatted with the players, the response was usually positive - but everything went downhill quick when a quest was involved.